Adecco's UK sales and bids teams are currently using the cloud platform, which could be rolled out more widely across the business in future

Matthew Finnegan is the former editor of Computerworld UK. He joined IDG in January 2013, having spent two years writing for various online tech publications. He still covers enterprise technology over at Computerworld in the USA.

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Adecco has streamlined its contract bidding processes by using Huddle’s cloud collaboration platform, allowing the recruitment firm to take on more business opportunities with its large corporate clients.

The UK arm of Adecco deployed the software as a service platform earlier this year, offering staff easier access to documents used throughout the sales process.

“Bid teams have gained efficiencies because they can find things faster,” says Greet Brosens, Adecco group sales director, "they can chase their approvals more effectively and they can see more quickly where the tender they are working on is, rather than ploughing through all of the emails they used to have to do."

She added: “They have been able to take on more bid work with the same size of team than before – so the volume of what they work on has gone up.”

The Huddle platform was initially rolled out to Adecco’s UK sales and bids teams, which work to generate and close opportunities with corporate clients.

The aim was to create a central repository of sales and bid information, having previously relied on tools such as Excel spreadsheets.

“Our initial request for a tool was simple – our most burning issue at the time was a more searchable platform for our bid library. Something that was more searchable, but that could also be shared with a wider group, so replacing an intranet,” said Brosens.

The company soon realised that it could expand the use of the software as a service platform to provide greater insight into tracking the progress of bids.

“When we came across Huddle, while that did meet the brief, we also felt that it could meet a lot more, particularly around the clarity of processes and approval chains.”

'Better visibility into sales pipeline than Salesforce'

Brosens says that - for certain uses - Huddle provides a clearer view into the sales process than its Salesforce CRM system.

“I can now press a button and see all tenders that we are working on, where I have to approve opportunities, and where other people have to approve pricing,” she says. “I can get all the models that we are building, all the pricing that we are building, see what stages they are at, what people have looked at them, who hasn’t looked at it.

“It just gives me much greater visibility into the sales pipeline in a more detailed way than Salesforce can offer me.”

While Adecco will not replace Salesforce with Huddle, the collaboration platform could soon be used in the place of other tools, if plans to continue to roll out the software more widely across its UK operations continue.

“Ultimately Huddle can replace a wide suite of tools that most companies already have in place,” says Brosens.

“If we are going to touch on the whole workforce [with Huddle] we probably would end up replacing the tools that we currently have in place."

As well as Adecco's intranet, it could also replace Microsoft’s Sharepoint, which is currently in use across the business.

“To me, Sharepoint only offered a fraction of what Huddle can offer,” says Brosens. “If you are working on a [sales] opportunity you have probably got around five to 10 people involved, and you are passing a document around to several people, but you want to make it very visible what comments people are adding.

“To have clear visibility of that chain of events and the approvals that sit with that wasn’t possible in Sharepont in the same way you can do it in Huddle.”